


Starlight

by NovelistAngel23



Series: A Star in the Dark [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Blood, Creepy Fluff, Dark, Death, M/M, Murder, Non-Explicit Sex, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-04-03 13:47:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4103170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NovelistAngel23/pseuds/NovelistAngel23
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time, he was just some rookie; the second time, his hands were steadier; the third time, his eyes were brighter; it became routine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Starlight

The first time, he was just some rookie. Nervous, swallowed a little too hard, shifty eyes. He wasn’t subtle, and he wasn’t smooth.

But _God_ , the way he moved. His eyes had this habit of lighting up, blood on his face looked like sunlight on his skin. He turned to me and smiled wide, too wide, freckles on his skin like stars, connected with dark red lines—constellations.

“Pretty good for a first kill, huh?” he asked me.

I just patted his shoulder. “You did good,” I told him.

And we hefted the body into our van, drove out to the river. I watched him while we dumped the cadaver, hesitantly whispered into the cold night air, “Where you headed after this?”

He hummed, didn’t even think long about his answer. “Somewhere,” he murmured, staring off into the stars. “Not far. I think I like this job. Might do it again.”

And that was the first time.

 

* * *

 

The second time, his hands were steadier. He smiled at me when he found the target, a longing for my approval in his wide eyes. I nodded, waved my hand in dismissal, and that was enough for him.

Starry-eyed, he watched me make the kill later that night.

“You’re amazing,” he whispered, when he thought I couldn’t hear him.

 

* * *

 

The third time, his eyes were brighter, his brows furrowed and determined over them: dressed to impress.

I told him he was making a mess, and he paused in the middle of his work. Embarrassed and almost disappointed, his frown dripped red when he rubbed at his mouth with the back of his hand. “Got carried away.”

“Hey, what’s the point of all this hard work if you don’t get to have a little fun?” I murmured back.

He lit up again, a star amongst the darkness. “Yeah. Yeah, get over and help me.”

So I did.

 

* * *

 

It became routine. I liked it, the way his hand felt underneath mine when I held it to steady his knife. He shook and trembled, but what I used to see as nerves turned out to be excitement.

“Hey,” he whispered once, as we dug side-by-side, body laid between us. He glanced over at me, eyes sparkling. “I know you’re not really in this for the money.”

I couldn’t hide my smile. “Your point?”

“Why don’t you just do it for yourself?”

I paused. The crunch of the shovel in the dirt, the gentle inhale of his breath through his nose. “Jean?”

“You know, in this business, they call that settling down.”

He hummed, turned back to his work. “Putting down roots?”

I shook my head, stared down into the darkness we’d created together. “Don’t really have any roots,” I admitted softly. “Vines, maybe.”

“I’ve got thorns,” he answered back, chipper almost. “Guess that makes a rose, between the two of us.”

 

* * *

 

They told us to pretend we were a couple. The first few times it was fine, but once, I just couldn’t. Found a pretty face in the crowd, spent the night somewhere else.

“Where’d you go?” he asked when I stepped back into our hotel room.

“Nowhere important.”

He was so dark there, sitting curled up in the center of the bed—too big for just one person. It made him look tiny, broad shoulders hunched as if he were trying to hide. When he laughed, it was bitter. “You know we’re supposed to be a couple.”

I just sneered at him, stalked over to the mirror to fix my hair, mussed and worried by her frantic hands. “We’re not.”

I liked the way his sigh sounded through his nose, always had. “Did you kill her?”

Gasping underneath me, screaming, writhing. There were claw marks in my biceps. I rubbed my arm where the scratches laid beneath my clothing.

“What do you think?” I wanted to rip it off, my clothes, my skin, wanted to claw it off and hide from it, _this is who I am—who I am, this is who I am_ —“That’s what monsters do, isn’t it?”

“Monsters?”

“People like you and me, Marco.” I whipped around to him, and although he didn’t flinch back, his eyes sparked. “We don’t do it for the money, you know why we’re in it.”

“That doesn’t make us monsters,” he whispered to me, letting go of his knees.

I dropped onto one knee on the bed, crawled towards him. “No? No, then what the fuck are we, Marco. What the fuck _am I_?”

And I grabbed him. Grabbed his legs and wrenched him towards me, and he didn’t fight me. He let me wrap my hands around his neck, just smiled up at me when tears started hot in the corners of my eyes. “What the fuck am I, Marco, if I’m not a monster, then what the fuck am I?”

His hands were so soothing against mine, palms gentle as he pushed my sleeves up so he could smooth his palms against the scratches there. “Monsters are mindless,” he rasped, the breath I was stealing from him making his voice rough. “We’re so much more than that.”

And as he spoke, my hands loosened, my jaw going slack as I stared down at him. “You and I, Jean, we’re… we’re grim reapers.” That grin of his, too wide to be natural. Eyes sparkling, stars in the darkness. “We’re the harbingers of death, we’re poetry in motion.”

“Marco…”

“You are so much more than a monster, Jean,” he murmured, palms on my face. His gaze was reverent. “Look at you. You have the power to choose who lives, who dies.” He took my hands again, from around his neck. He sat up and held them between us. “There’s so much power in these hands. You’re not a monster—Jean, God, no.” His eyes flicked up to mine, wide, dangerous, _beautiful_. “You’re a _god_.”

When our lips met, it was like an explosion behind my eyelids, and he moaned, his entire body trembling when I pressed forward. Hands in my hair. Immortal, immortal, we were gods.

I understood what love was, for a moment, when he was the one gasping, screaming, writhing underneath me—love was this weakness, this vulnerability, without the touch of death to soil it. When I touched him, when I let my hand slide against his sweat-slick skin, I was not a god of death—I was a god of starlight, focusing every bit of my power into connecting the stars on his skin into constellations.

 

* * *

 

“I want to settle down,” he whispered into the crook of my neck one night, as we waited for the sound of footsteps outside the door.

“You saying what I think you’re saying?” I asked in response.

Warm against my side, his hand and mine tangled on my stomach. “I want a little house,” he murmured. “Or a big one, we could afford it.” He tangled his legs with mine. “I want a pretty front yard, that we can decorate every Halloween.” He nipped my skin, teasing and gentle. “With real bodies, no one will suspect a thing.”

I just hummed, smiled. “You’re speaking my language.”

“A pool,” he groaned. “Of acid, for the bodies when we’re done with them.”

His hand dripped lower, to the zipper of my jeans. “A dog. We’ll play fetch with human bones, how cool would that be?”

The footsteps we were waiting for echoed through the door, and he sat up to smile down at me. A brief, fleeting kiss against my mouth. “Think about it, baby.”

Maybe it was the way he held my face in his blood-soaked hands after that or the way it felt to hold him against my chest in the bathtub as I cleaned the blood from underneath his fingernails… something in the domesticity. Something in the ordinary. Something in his smile that felt safe.

That was the last time.

* * *

 

His name is Elias. Marco picked him out. He’s ten years old now and normal. So normal.

“How are we going to raise a kid, Marco?” I’d hissed that first night he suggested it. “How the fuck are we supposed to raise a kid—you want him to be like us?”

He didn’t answer. He just sighed. He looked out the window, off into the distance.

He’s normal. One day, after we adopted him, Marco told me we’d raise him the way he wanted to be raised. If he was like us—if he drowned pigeons or dissected squirrels or watched ants burn in the light of his magnifying glass, if he smiled when he watched horror movies, sure, we’d raise him like us.

He does none of those things.

And yet when I look down at him, I don’t want to hurt him. It’s just like Marco. This vulnerability, this weakness—it’s love.

I worry sometimes, late at night, when Marco’s pretending to be asleep, that he’ll find out. That Elias will walk in one day, when there’s blood running down our skin and soaking our clothes and he won’t understand. What will we say to our normal, normal son?

_Morality_ , I whisper to myself sometimes, _is a field of gray flowers. You stop to smell the roses and then forget what they look like. It all blends together. You don’t know black from white. You just go towards what smells the nicest_.

He wouldn’t understand it. I don’t understand it.

_I’m a monster, I’m a monster_.

Marco holds me when it gets too violent in my head, when my chest is heaving and I forget how to breathe. “God,” he whispers, “You’re a god. You’re immortal. I love you.”

Humans weren’t meant to have so much power, but I’m hungry for it, and Marco is too. He still grins that grin at me—too big for his face, like a Cheshire cat, full of riddles and magic. It will never fade.

 

* * *

 

One day, the news is playing in the kitchen. Elias is sleeping in—summer vacation. It’s just me and Marco and the dog (Floofy—Marco insisted). The news is playing, and he’s speaking softly over his coffee about Elias’s summer work and where he wants to go for date night and which friend Elias should stay overnight with whilst we get around to torturing the victim we’ll capture tonight.

And when the news report switches to a story about a string of disappearances, Marco looks up at me. His eyes are stars compared to the strained sunlight flowing in from the window. “God only knows where those poor people are now, huh, babe?”

I return his Cheshire grin with a small one of my own.

**Author's Note:**

> First things first: I DO NOT CONDONE ANY OF THE SHIT THAT WENT DOWN IN THIS FIC. Don't go around killing people okay, please, God, don't do that.
> 
> Anyway, yeah, someone said serial killer/hitman AU and then Chonideno and I were making headcanons and I had some time so... Tada! This one's for you. (= It's not exactly what we were talking about, but this is how it turned out so... enjoy a little bit of horror with your daily dose of jeanmarco.
> 
> (Also, I like really love this piece, oh my god, idk what it is, but this is like... a favorite of mine, I'm so proud of it.)
> 
> So! If you like, please, please, leave me a comment and kudos (or just a comment tbh, I love them). If you want to see more from me or want to talk to me or anything of the sort, my writing sideblog is novelistangel.tumblr.com. Thanks for reading! =D


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